The 10 Biggest Microsoft News Stories Of 2024 (So Far)
The 10 Biggest Microsoft News Stories Of 2024 (So Far) New partner program investments, AI innovation and cloud outages are among the biggest headlines so far. New partner program investments. Innovation in the artificial intelligence portfolio. And cloud outages and concerns around security. These are some of the ways Microsoft has captured headlines in 2024 so far as the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant rides high on its role as one of the biggest companies in the growing AI space. Microsoft Business Intelligence – Business Excellence Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – named in July as CRN’s No. 1 Most Influential Executive of 2024 – and his team are investing in its 400,000-plus partner-strong ecosystem solution providers to not only help stand up AI technology within customer environments, but to also make customers more cyber resilient and to continue migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud. [RELATED: 2024 Year In Review (So Far)] Microsoft News 2024 Microsoft is a member of CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs. Enterprise business intelligence – Azure Architecture Center In July, Microsoft executives revealed that the vendor brought in $245.1 billion in revenue, an increase of 15 percent year over year ignoring foreign exchange. Microsoft Cloud revenue surpassed $135 billion, up 23 percent year over year. For the 2025 fiscal year, CFO Amy Hood said that she expects “double-digit revenue and operating income growth as we focus on delivering differentiated value for our customers.” Here are some of the ways Microsoft has dominated headlines this year so far. This list is part of CRN’s 2024 Year In Review (So Far) series. Other lists include The 10 Biggest AWS News Stories Of 2024 (So Far) and The 10 Biggest Nvidia News Stories Of 2024 (So Far). Microsoft Business Intelligence for Powerful Analytics 10. January Microsoft Outages Outages are always a part of the cloud story, and Microsoft wasn’t spared from headline-grabbing issues at the start of the year. Azure Resource Manager experienced degradation on Jan. 21, with users contending with issues for about seven hours, from 1:30 UTC to 8:58, especially users in the Central U.S., East U.S., West Central U.S. and South Central U.S. The ARM issue affected downstream Azure services including CDN, Virtual Machines, Data Factory, Azure Container Registry and Service Bus, according to Microsoft. The issue came from a June 2020 ARM private preview integration with Entra Continuous Access Evaluation, according to Microsoft. “Unbeknownst to us, this preview feature of the ARM CAE implementation contained a latent code defect that caused issues when authentication to Entra failed,” according to the vendor. “The defect would cause ARM nodes to fail on startup whenever ARM could not authenticate to an Entra tenant enrolled in the preview.” A ThousandEyes report said that “the saving grace for Microsoft was that it occurred on a weekend, reducing the impact on users.” “However, the critical nature of ARM in Azure operations meant that the users who were impacted could do little but wait for a fix,” according to the report. On Jan. 26, Microsoft Teams had a widespread outage. Microsoft posted on X at 8:45 a.m. Pacific that “we’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft Teams features.” “We’ve identified a networking issue impacting a portion of the Teams service and we’re performing a failover to remediate impact,” the vendor posted on X at 9:17 a.m. Realtime outages monitor Downdetector reported receiving about 14,500 reports of a Microsoft Teams outage by 10:41 a.m. It received about 600 reports of a Microsoft 365 outage by around that time. A ThousandEyes report on the incident said that it “observed these failures starting at approximately 4 PM (UTC) (8 AM [PST]), and they persisted for more than 7 hours before the incident appeared to resolve for many users by 11:10 PM (UTC).” 9. Microsoft Hires Inflection’s CEO In March, Microsoft hired multiple employees from startup Inflection AI – including the startup’s CEO and co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who became a Microsoft executive vice president and CEO of the newly formed Microsoft AI organization. The startup’s $1.3 billion funding round last year included Microsoft and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Suleyman sold DeepMind to Google in 2014. He left Google in 2022 to co-found Inflection. The hiring appeared to have ripple effects within Microsoft’s leadership, with the vendor promoting Pavan Davuluri to lead a combined Windows Experiences and Windows + Devices team while its head of Windows Experiences left his job – days after he was moved to a position reporting to new Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. Mikhail Parakhin, identified as Microsoft’s CEO of advertising and web services on his LinkedIn, “decided to explore new roles,” according to Microsoft. In a May post to social media network X, formerly known as Twitter, Parakhin said he joined the advisory board of AI answer engine provider Perplexity. Close partnerships between tech giants and smaller AI organizations have led to scrutiny in the U.S. and in Europe. In July, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published a letter saying that it can “begin an investigation” into the Microsoft-Inflection deal. In January, the FTC announced that Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Google parent Alphabet and Anthropic needed to provide information on their recent investments and partnerships. Google appears to have done a similar Microsoft-Inflection deal with the startup Character.AI. 8. Microsoft Executive Accounts Breach In January The year started with good and bad news in Microsoft world – around increased access for Copilot for M365, Microsoft disclosed that a Russia-aligned threat actor was able to steal emails from members of its senior leadership team as well as from employees on its cybersecurity and legal teams. The tech giant attributed the attack to a group it tracks as Midnight Blizzard, which has previously been connected to Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence unit by the U.S. government and blamed for attacks including the widely felt 2020 breach of SolarWinds. Customers known to have been impacted in the incident included multiple federal agencies, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed. Through the compromise of Microsoft corporate …